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Steve, November 19, and the One-Name Challenge

Every time I run by
Steve he tells me, “Don’t cheat yourself, get those knees up!” I always try,
but I’m not a very good runner. He’ll fill me in on his favorite Who songs, show me pictures he’s taped
to the concrete highway beams, mostly pictures of Michelle Obama. I’ll get an update
on the growth of his turtle. When other homeless tents spring up around his
well-kempt area, with welcome mat, disco ball and all, he’s quick to defend me
with a gentle, “You all leave her alone you hear?”

Before Steve, I had grown cold to the homeless. That happens
quickly in LA. In my hometown in Michigan I was devoted in service, grilling
hotdog dinners for the disadvantaged, bestowing shoeboxes with hats and mittens
and ladling meals in soup kitchens. I knew the homeless by name: Beverly, the
elderly women who sold watercolor paintings of butterflies, Richard, the
rightly cantankerous Vietnam vet. Encountering the homeless was an uncommon
enough occurrence that I stepped in and out of their lives joyfully and freely.

And then I moved to Los Angeles and lived in a neighborhood where
the homeless issue wasn’t a Sunday volunteering session, but an omnipresent
wound difficult to ignore. Little by little the dubious panhandler on every
corner grew wearisome. The smells around my neighborhood became nauseating. The
needles on the sidewalks served as a constant fuel for agitation. And slowly I
stopped looking people in the eyes. And if I averted my gaze, and kept a strong
stomach, I didn’t need to think about them all that much. I could get along
with my day.

In announcing the first World Day of the Poor this November 19,
Pope Francis pierced through all my weaknesses with this challenge, “We may think of the poor simply as the beneficiaries of our
occasional volunteer work, or of impromptu acts of generosity that appease our
conscience. However good and useful such acts may be...they ought to lead to a
true.

I had lost the gift of “the encounter.”

Anyone living in Los Angeles knows painfully well
who the poor are. The homeless are a persistent, unsettling tapestry
in the background of our lives. You need
only drive under a bridge to find some discarded members of the 44,000-person society
rebuilding their tent homes. And the issue is tackled with nonprofit
organizations, more billions spent, new benchmarks set and masses of affordable
housing hastily built. It’s all very honorable, but if one thing is becoming
clear about this stubbornly mammoth population, it’s that we’re not getting to
its source. This isn’t an issue of impoverished without homes, the poverty is
of the soul, and we don’t attend to that wound.

Pope Francis has asked that we, “draw near to the poor…encounter them… meet
their gaze… embrace them and to let them feel the warmth of love that breaks
through their solitude.” We too have a “solitude” that must be broken through, a
poverty of spirit that must be shared. In the overwhelming magnitude of a tragedy
that grows each year (this year by an astounding 23%) we are bereft of the means to remove all
suffering for these people, and so in our shared poverty we can commune.

How do we begin to commune? Writer
Lindsay Blakely and her husband Jason have found a unique way to do just that.
Once a month they attend a poetry group with members of the homeless population
struggling with mental illness in a small drop-in community center in Santa
Monica. It begins with a facilitator offering a prompt and then, “Everyone in
the group tries their hand at writing something.” Blakely explains, “You really
put yourself in a vulnerable position, but we all do. I mean, when else are you
in a position where you are sharing something so private with people you barely
know.”

Blakeley describes a day she was struggling to get enough down on
paper before the time ended. “Everyone shared but me.” The group started
encouraging her, pressuring her to read what she had written above her
sheepish, “No, I didn’t finish!” protests. She eventually got the gumption to
lay herself, her unfinished poetry, and her pride on the line and put it in the
hands of the open-minded, loving group she came to call her community.

“In reality we’re doing very little. They might not know where
they’re going to sleep that night and we’re just having a poetry session with
them. Essentially we’re just offering beauty, and a little bit of
companionship.”

For Blakely, this experience has taught her the importance of focusing
on the individual. “I think the thought is, ‘Homelessness is a huge problem,
how can we solve this problem and help as many people as possible?’ which is an
understandable goal, but the real question is, ‘How can we solve this person by
person?’”

I was inspired by the Blakely’s, to take a step – a really small
one. Last year at a United Nations Humanitarian Summit, Pope Francis encouraged
aid workers to ask the names of the people they were serving. It seemed too
adorable and childlike to me when I had visions of Peace Prizes, but I tried it
anyway. I met the man who lived in a tent home under the overpass I passed each
day. I met Steve. And from the tiniest of encounters spawned an unlikely
camaraderie.

I think this could be how we challenge ourselves this November
19. Whoever the poor are that are placed in our
lives – poor in spirit, poor in companionship, poor in wisdom – we should
challenge ourselves to greet those “discarded” members of society that we so
easily bypass. Let’s each get one name. Don’t resort to donations or an
isolated service opportunity. These are incredibly acts of charity, but let’s
challenge ourselves to a new practice. Who is that impatient cashier at the
grocery store, the socially awkward parishioner no one wants to be stuck
talking to, the widower who lives down the street, the man living in a tent
under the overpass? What are their names?

Let us actually try to crush the social divisions
we have created, and do the unrealistic task of forming the Body of Christ here
in our daily, tepid lives. And with this vision, we can hope to achieve the
advice Steve gives me at the close of every conversation with his Vulcan
salute, “Live long and prosper now, you hear?”

Casey McCorry is a digital associate for the Archdiocese of Los Angeles, a documentary filmmaker, wife and mother.

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